Eco-Friendly Packaging Wraps Products in Natural Designs

As disposing of plastic waste becomes a bigger and bigger environmental problem, green-minded people are trying to find ways to reduce and even eliminate its use as much as possible. One major user of plastic waste is the food packaging industry. Plastic has long been used as a way to keep foods fresh during transport and shelf time, and plastic and Styrofoam are often used for food service and takeaway containers. However, new inventions in sustainable packaging are seeking to eliminate the use of these materials, making not only packaged foods themselves biodegradable, but also the material surrounding them.

Consider the egg, the outer shell of which, though it’s not used, is as biodegradable as its inner shell and can be used as natural fertilizer for plants and for other purposes. This makes it a perfect example of the goals sustainable packaging advocates are trying to achieve, Leif Steiner, principal and creative director at Moxie Sozo, a design and advertising agency in Boulder, Colo., that tries to achieve sustainability in all of its design and business practices, tells Design News. “The ultimate package would protect the contents during shipping and then be consumable or reusable afterward,” he says. “Nature's ultimate package would, of course, be an egg.”

A container for oil designed by Swedish design firm Tomorrow Machine made of caramelized sugar and a wax coating. To open it, you crack it like an egg. (Source: Tomorrow Machine)

While sustainable packaging is still in its early stages, there is a fair number of companies already offering options for the food service and manufacturing industries. Meanwhile, creative designers are coming up with some innovative ways to create biodegradable and sustainable packaging for food products.

Key distinction
Before elaborating on some of the ideas designers have for greener directions in food packaging, a distinction must be made between biodegradable and sustainable solutions. Steiner cautions that these words should be used carefully, since “the industry loves to use terms like biodegradable and sustainable, but at the end of the day very little is biodegradable, and very little is sustainable. It’s the journey more than the destination.”

But by working with materials that aren’t plastic, designers and manufacturers are beginning to develop packaging that can be reused and recycled more, and that also does less harm to the environment. With biodegradable packaging, “the concept is that something when it returns to the earth, would degrade into natural products,” he says. Sustainable packaging, on the other hand, in theory “doesn’t cost the earth anything,” because it can be reused or recycled. That said, he cautions, “Anything we do comes with a cost.”

Greener design ideas
Keeping this in mind, design firms are devising innovative ways to package food that stray from traditional packaging concepts. Perhaps some of the most creative ideas in biodegradable packaging have come from Swedish firm Tomorrow Machine, based in Stockholm and Paris.
Steiner mentioned the inspiration for packaging ideas that can come from an egg. The designers at Tomorrow Machine were inspired by fruit skin for their campaign, "This Too Shall Pass," in which they designed a number of food packages that have the same short life span as their contents and are composed of natural materials.

“We started this project by asking the question: ‘Is it reasonable that it takes several years for a milk carton to decompose naturally, when the milk goes sour after a week?’ ” Anna Glansen, co-founder of Tomorrow Machine, tells us. “The package and its content are working in symbiosis. In this project, we ask ourselves how packaging can be made in a near future, with the technology that is available today. Our inspiration is fruit peel and how nature itself packages food.”

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Greg. It's true that sometimes it just takes new thinking to spur major changes or improvements, even if the initial ideas don't solve the entire problem. I really especially think Tomorrow Machines is on to something.

I was encouraged by this article. While I understand that this will not solve all of our waste problems, it brought some interesting ideas up for discussion. I was intrigued by the idea that packaging doesn't have to last longer than the shelf life of the product. This new way of thinking could create some innovations in the packaging arena.

Thank you, bobjengr. It's good to know companies are thinking about this. I'm sure it's quite a daunting task to come up with the wrapping for products, especially small ones like the ones you mention. To come up with more eco-friendly designs is even more of a challenge, but good that people are considering them. Glad you enjoyed the article!

Several months ago I had the pleasure in visiting a company that produces candy mints; the type given as you leave a restaurant. These are individually wrapped. The high-speed packaging equipment was an absolute marvel to behold. Thousands of individual mints being produced and wrapped per minute. The machinery to accomplish this task was a mechanical engineer's dream. In talking with the CFO, the company is very much aware of needing a substitute for the non-biodegradable wrapping now in use. I mention this to indicate that companies in our country are very much aware of their responsibilities relative to insuring and preserving a clean environment. Most of the work I have done over the years has been in the appliance industry where packaging is a huge cost to the consumer and produces tons of non-biodegradable material; i.e. cartooning, bands, shrink-wrap, etc etc. The efforts to move in another direction are extremely valuable and long overdue.

Thank you for the comment, Battar, and your book suggestion. I will check it out. Yes, I know there are a lot of myths out there about "biodegradeable" packaging and other types of rubbish. It's important to cut through the hype. Still, I think any efforts to make things that will end up in the trash more natural and less chemical are good ones.

This issue is more about the "feel good" factor and marketing an idea than actual environmental concerns. Decomposition of bio-degradable material relies on oxygen, and the vast majority of packaging material ends up buried in landfills where it gets about 2 weeks at most to degrade before the oxygen supply is cut off completely by layers of fresh garbage. You might like to read the book "Rubbish - the archeology of garbage" by William Rathje or "Garbage land" by Elizabeth Royte to learn a bit more about what really happens (or doesn't happen) to discarded biodegradable materials.

I really enjoyed writing and researching this story and seeing all the ways that designers are finding to make food packaging more eco-friendly. The Swedish team especially has some truly innovative designs, taking cues from nature itself, which creates the most eco-friendly of all packaging systems. I think anything that can be done to reduce all the synthetic waste that's made because of our packaging systems is a very good thing.

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